Event Blog #2

“Singular Spaces” at the Fowler Museum

I decided to go to the Fowler Museum for an event blog, and I was not disappointed. “Singular Spaces” shows art that is original and raw, almost surreal. Jo Farb Hernandez’s pictures of artists’ work out in the open using only materials that they had in hand displays the ingenuity and creativity of the artists. Usually, the artists would create the art around their homes, with no reason other than to express their feelings or simply amuse themselves. The description makes the point that the artists did not have any formal training, and I think that this makes the work more interesting and refreshing. Although I have never been schooled in artistic techniques (and therefore I may not be qualified to make this statement), I feel that sometimes artists feel to need to conform to certain genres that they were taught in class, and consequently their work is stuck in a well-traveled rut. I think that it is much easier for an “untrained” artist to break new ground, and the artists in Jo Farb Hernandez’s pictures are good examples to prove this idea.

Julio Basanta Lopez’s work was the most striking to me. He created these sculptures to exorcise the demons of his past because his life had been constantly beset by heartbreak. In many of the forms of his work, you can see how much pain he was experiencing.  The color red permeates most of his works leading me to believe that the red represents the bleeding that his family experienced and also represents the constant ache from his heart.

Many of his sculptures take the form of demons that Lopez may have been seeing in his nightmares. The red one looks particularly menacing because it appears to be holding a weapon and has a chain around its neck. The white one with the red blood stain looks more innocent to me because it is shorter and wider. I wonder if it represents one of his lost children as a ghost.